It was Watkins with his truck. The broken taillight. No way that was a coincidence.

Edith Moore saw her mother get in that truck. Watkins’s Silverado.

Watkins was the one who knew where her mother was.

Reyes was smiling now. “You feel better? Your breathing has slowed.”

Nic smiled back. “I think she’s alive. I think Watkins drove her somewhere. Helped her leave. I don’t even care that she walked away, or why she did it. I just want her back.”

Reyes patted her knee. “I know. And we will get her . . .” He stopped speaking but Nic could tell he was holding something back.

“What?” she asked.

“I found something else. On your father’s credit card statements.”

“Just tell me.” Nic braced herself for what she knew was coming.

“There are some hotel charges. Local ones, in your town.”

Nic stared out the window, feeling the traces of hope leave her. “I knew, but I still didn’t believe it. Not completely.”

“There’s one other charge that I can’t explain. At a gas station near West Cornwall.”

“That’s just south of here. When was that?”

Reyes didn’t answer. And then he didn’t need to.

“The same day. The day she disappeared,” Nic said.

“Look, maybe it was her—the charges are on the same statement.”

“But then she wouldn’t have run out of gas,” Nic said. “If she’d filled up in West Cornwall, she would have made it well past Hastings coming home.”

Reyes was silent again. He’d come to the same conclusion.

“This can’t be right,” Nic said.

“I can call them, find out the exact time of the charge.”

Nic closed her eyes, hard. This couldn’t be happening. Her father couldn’t be involved.

“Do you want me to call?” Reyes asked.

Slowly, but with conviction, Nic nodded.

Yes.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Day sixteen

We lie on the floor. I am on my side of the bars. Alice is on the other. She wanted to sleep near me even though we are not allowed to sleep together anymore, so I told her to get some blankets and cushions from the sofa. I showed her how to make a pillow bed and she liked it very much. Of course she did. My kids used to love pillow beds. When we would go to a hotel, all of us, as a family—oh, that was another life—we would share a room. Me and John in one bed. Two kids in the other. And the third on a cozy bed between them, made from cushions or extra pillows—whatever we could find in the room.

The trick is to tuck a sheet tightly beneath them so they don’t come apart.